Harry Dean Stanton
Actor
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- If I like the role, I'll just do it. I don't care how small it is. There are no small parts. You know that old saying, right? There are only small actors.
- Usually, I just play myself. Whatever psychological traumas or conflicts I'm going through at the time I try to put into the role. Sometimes it's quite a feat to pull off, but sometimes it works. If it doesn't correspond to the dilemmas of the character, then I don't do the film.
- Acting is my connection to the community, with the world at large. I hope what I do benefits the community without being moralizing.
- Was in a relationship with Rebecca De Mornay from 1981 to 1983.
- Stanton has been named as a favorite actor by characters in novels by Elmore Leonard. Skip Gibbs, a serial bomber in the novel Freaky Deaky, watches Straight Time (1978) because Stanton is his favorite actor. Two characters in Leonard's novel Maximum Bob chat about how much the novel's title character resembles Stanton, an actor they both admire. Stanton did not appear in the "Maximum Bob" (1998) TV series, but did have a role in The Big Bounce (2004), also based on an Elmore Leonard novel
- Was drafted into the Navy in World War II. He was in the Battle of Okinawa.
- 1988: Member of the jury at the Venice Film Festival.
- Critic Roger Ebert so admires him that he created the "Stanton-Walsh Rule," which states that "no movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad." Ebert later admitted that Dream a Little Dream (1989), in which Stanton appeared, was a "clear violation" of this rule.
- Had a small role as a jail guard in the 1978 Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong film Up in Smoke (1978), but his scenes were cut.
- Was Best Man at the wedding of Jack Nicholson and Sandra Knight. After their divorce, Nicholson lived for a time with Stanton.
- Lived in Lexington, Kentucky and graduated from Lafayette Senior High School with the class of 1944.
- Was tied up and pistol-whipped at his home in L.A. after a robbery. The thieves then took off in the actors car, but were soon apprehended after the car was traced by a tracking device. Stanton suffered only minor injuries. (20 January 1996)
- The name of his musical group was originally "Harry Dean Stanton and the Repo Men".
- Prior to 1971, he was credited in films and on TV as Dean Stanton so as to avoid any confusion with character actor Harry Stanton, both of whom would appear together in a 1969 episode of "Petticoat Junction" (1963).
- He fronts a band called "The Harry Dean Stanton Band" which regularly performs in the Los Angeles area. He sings and plays guitar. The band plays a mix of jazz, pop, and tex-mex styles. The band often plays in Hollywood at 'Jack's Sugar Shack'.